DOGE dopes may have dumped your Social Security number and info onto the internet

Whistleblower Warns of Possible Risks to Americans’ Social Security Information 

The Government Accountability Project submitted a protected whistleblower disclosure to the Office of Special Counsel and congressional committees with grave allegations of data security lapses that put over 300 million Americans’ social security information at risk. 

Whistleblower Charles Borges, the Chief Data Officer (CDO) at the Social Security Administration (SSA), disclosed reports that Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) officials employed by SSA have created a live copy of the country’s Social Security information in a cloud environment that circumvents oversight. 

Should bad actors gain access to this cloud environment, Americans may be susceptible to widespread identity theft, lose vital healthcare and food benefits, and the government could be responsible for re-issuing every American a new Social Security number. 

Charles Borges began serving as the CDO of SSA and leading the Office of Analytics, Review, and Oversight on January 27, 2025, responsible for the safety, integrity, and security of the public’s data at SSA. His position requires full visibility into data access, data exchange, and cloud-based environments. 

Since DOGE’s founding in January 2025, DOGE officials have sought to access the American public’s Social Security data, purportedly to address claims of fraud. A lawsuit was filed to stop DOGE’s access to the data which resulted in the court issuing a temporary restraining order on March 20, 2025 that was in effect until June 6, 2025. 

Mr. Borges’ disclosure describes multiple instances of wrongdoing at SSA progressing from a circumvention of the court’s order in March 2025 to approval of high-risk activities outside of normal review and approval procedures by July 2025. 

Mr. Borges details how DOGE personnel appeared to have given themselves authorization to create a copy of SSA’s entire live set of data on the American public without any independent security or oversight mechanisms in place. 

Private companies gather weather info and sell it to Weather Service since Trump budget cuts hobble NWS ability to collect it themselves

Call it weather grifting, and we could see it coming

By Meg Wilcox

When staffing shortages caused the National Weather Service (NWS) to suspend weather balloon launches at its Kotzebue, Alaska, station earlier this year, a startup deploying next-generation weather balloons, WindBorne Systems, stepped up to fill the void. 

The company began selling its western Alaskan atmospheric data to the NWS in February, plugging what could have been a critical data gap in weather forecasting. 

Weather balloons collect real-time atmospheric temperature, humidity, wind speed and pressure data that meteorologists use to predict the weather and understand longer-term changes to the climate. The Alaska office was one of about a dozen to suspend or scale back balloon launches in response to deep staffing cuts instituted by the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). 

Critics claim that the cuts have weakened the NWS’ forecasting capacity as hurricane season bears down and extreme weather events, like the floods that ripped through Texas, claim lives and destroy property.

Round-up of new Rhode Island legislation and how it will affect us

2025 General Assembly session passed 826 new laws. Here are some highlights

By Uprise RI Staff

Uprise RI - Rhode Island's Advocate | RI News & Opinion

This is an ongoing series breaking down the new laws coming out of the General Assembly this summer. The ink is dry on a number of bills that will reshape pieces of daily life here in the Ocean State. Here are the first three installments combined.

No cell phones in school, access to the beach and getting more doctors

First, let’s talk about the classroom. A new law, H5598, will require every public school in the state to implement a policy prohibiting students from physically accessing their personal electronic devices during the school day. Before you panic, there are a few key points here. The law makes clear exceptions for students who need devices for medical reasons, for an IEP or 504 plan, or to assist with language learning. So, a student monitoring their glucose on a smartwatch is fine. The goal is to reduce distractions and get kids focused on learning, not TikTok. School districts have some time to figure this out, as the law doesn’t take effect until August 1, 2026.

Next, for anyone who has ever stared at a stretch of coastline and wondered, “Can I actually walk there?”, bill H5686 offers a bit of clarity. This law amends the duties of the Coastal Resources Management Council (CRMC) by requiring municipalities to officially identify, list, and display all CRMC-designated public rights-of-way on their official maps. We believe this puts the responsibility squarely on towns to make public access points clear to the public, preventing these paths from becoming forgotten or obscured over time. If a town fails to do so, it doesn’t change the legal status of the right-of-way. This is a small but meaningful step in the continuing effort to protect public access to the shore.

Finally, in a move to address the state’s physician shortage, S0347 creates a new, tiered licensing system for internationally-trained physicians. The program allows doctors trained abroad to obtain a limited, supervised license to work in a designated shortage area. After a period of assessment and after passing all required U.S. medical exams, they can progress to a restricted license for independent practice in that shortage area, and eventually, to a full, unrestricted license. It’s a pragmatic approach that could connect underserved communities with qualified doctors who are currently sidelined by licensing hurdles.

This Test Tells You More About Your Heart Attack Risk

Quick and simple test gives you your odds

Paula Span 

A long list of Lynda Hollander’s paternal relatives had heart disease, and several had undergone major surgeries. So when she hit her mid-50s and saw her cholesterol levels creeping up after menopause, she said, “I didn’t want to take a chance.”

A cardiologist told Hollander that based on factors like age, sex, cholesterol, and blood pressure, she faced a moderate risk of a major cardiac event, like a heart attack, within the next 10 years.

Doctors typically counsel such patients about the importance of diet and exercise, but Hollander, now 64, a social worker in West Orange, New Jersey, didn’t have much room for improvement. She was already a serious runner, and although “I fall off the wagon once in a while,” her diet was basically healthy. Attempts to lose weight didn’t lower her cholesterol.

Her doctor explained that a coronary artery calcium test, something Hollander had never heard of, could provide a more precise estimate of her risk of atherosclerotic heart disease. A brief and painless CT scan, it would indicate whether calcifications and plaque were developing in the arteries leading to her heart.

When plaque ruptures, it can cause clots that block blood flow and trigger heart attacks. The scan would help determine whether Hollander would benefit from taking a statin, which could reduce plaque and prevent more from forming.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Given my age (75) and diabetes as a risk factor, my doctors recommended this test. It was painless, quick and cost me $100. The results predict my odds of a heart attack in the next 10 years at 23.5%.    - Will Collette

What history’s witch hunts have in common with today’s misinformation crisis

History provides insight into the MAGA mind 

Julie Walsh, Wellesley College

An illustration from ‘The History of Witches and Wizards,’
published in 1720, depicting witches offering
wax dolls to the devil. Wellcome Collection/Wikimedia Commons

Between 1400 and 1780, an estimated 100,000 people, mostly women, were prosecuted for witchcraft in Europe. About half that number were executed – killings motivated by a constellation of beliefs about women, truth, evil and magic.

But the witch hunts could not have had the reach they did without the media machinery that made them possible: an industry of printed manuals that taught readers how to find and exterminate witches.

I regularly teach a class on philosophy and witchcraft, where we discuss the religious, social, economic and philosophical contexts of early modern witch hunts in Europe and colonial America. I also teach and research the ethics of digital technologies.

These fields aren’t as different as they seem. The parallels between the spread of false information in the witch-hunting era and in today’s online information ecosystem are striking – and instructive.

Is ChatGPT making us stupid?

Duh

Aaron French, Kennesaw State University

Back in 2008, The Atlantic sparked controversy with a provocative cover story: Is Google Making Us Stupid?

In that 4,000-word essay, later expanded into a book, author Nicholas Carr suggested the answer was yes, arguing that technology such as search engines were worsening Americans’ ability to think deeply and retain knowledge.

At the core of Carr’s concern was the idea that people no longer needed to remember or learn facts when they could instantly look them up online. While there might be some truth to this, search engines still require users to use critical thinking to interpret and contextualize the results.

Fast-forward to today, and an even more profound technological shift is taking place. With the rise of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, internet users aren’t just outsourcing memory – they may be outsourcing thinking itself.

Generative AI tools don’t just retrieve information; they can create, analyze and summarize it. This represents a fundamental shift: Arguably, generative AI is the first technology that could replace human thinking and creativity.

That raises a critical question: Is ChatGPT making us stupid?

The environmental toll of artificial intelligence

Trump AI plan would “ramp up exploitation” of people and the environment, advocates warn

Shannon Kelleher 

The Trump administration this week released a plan to fast-track the growth of artificial intelligence (AI) in the US, delighting tech groups while alarming environmental advocates who point to the industry’s toxic emissions, high water usage and heavy reliance on fossil fuels.

The “AI action plan,” released July 23 by the White House, calls for the development of new AI data centers – huge facilities that house AI computing infrastructure – to be waived from typical assessment requirements under the National Environmental Policy Act, which determine a project’s environmental impact.

The plan also proposes expediting environmental permitting for such data centers by streamlining or reducing regulations under the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and other environmental laws, and calls on agencies to make federal lands available for constructing data centers and their power generation infrastructure.

In accordance with the Trump Administration’s AI plan, the US Department of Energy today announced four sites across the country selected to invite private sector partners to develop AI data centers and energy generation projects – a “bold step” that will “accelerate the next Manhattan Project,” said Energy Secretary Chris Wright in a statement.

As Charlestown suffers through unhealthy air, which wildfire smoke plumes are hazardous?

New satellite tech can map them in 3D for air quality alerts at neighborhood scale

Jun Wang, University of Iowa

Wildfire smoke is not just Canada's problem but ours too.
Will detection and protection efforts survive Trump
budget cuts?

Canada is facing another dangerous wildfire season, with burning forests sending smoke plumes across the provinces and into the U.S. again. 

The pace of the 2025 fires is reminiscent of the record-breaking 2023 wildfire season, which exposed millions of people in North America to hazardous smoke levels.

For most of the past decade, forecasters have been able to use satellites to track these smoke plumes, but the view was only two-dimensional: The satellites couldn’t determine how close the smoke was to Earth’s surface.

The altitude of the smoke matters.

If a plume is high in the atmosphere, it won’t affect the air people breathe – it simply floats by far overhead.

But when smoke plumes are close to the surface, people are breathing in wildfire chemicals and tiny particles. Those particles, known as PM2.5, can get deep into the lungs and exacerbate asthma and other respiratory and cardiac problems.

An animation on May 30, 2025, shows a thick smoke plume from Canada moving over Minnesota, but the air quality monitors on the ground detected minimal risk, suggesting it was a high-level smoke plume. NOAA NESDIS Center for Satellite Applications and Research

The Environmental Protection Agency uses a network of ground-based air quality monitors to issue air quality alerts, but the monitors are few and far between, meaning forecasts have been broad estimates in much of the country.

Trump 2.0 is deploying new surveillance methods to extend its authoritarian power

Big Brother Donald Is Watching You

Rebecca Gordon for TomDispatch

Sometime in the late 1980s, I was talking with a friend on my landline (the only kind of telephone we had then). We were discussing logistics for an upcoming demonstration against the Reagan administration’s support for the Contras fighting the elected government of Nicaragua. We agreed that, when our call was done, I’d call another friend, “Mary,” to update her on the plans. I hung up.

But before I could make the call, my phone rang.

“Hi, this is Mary,” my friend said.

“Mary! I was just about to call you.”

“But you did call me,” she said.

“No, I didn’t. My phone just rang, and you were on the other end.”

It was pretty creepy, but that was how surveillance worked in the days of wired telephone systems. Whoever was listening in, most likely someone from the local San Francisco Police Department, had inadvertently caused both lines to ring, while preparing to catch my coming conversation with Mary. Assuming they’d followed the law, arranging such surveillance would have involved a number of legal and technical steps, including securing a wiretapping warrant. They’d have had to create a physical connection between their phones and ours, most likely by plugging into the phone company’s central office.

Government surveillance has come a long way since then, both technically and in terms of what’s legally possible in Donald Trump’s United States and under the John Roberts Supreme Court.

All the President’s Tech

Government agencies have many ways of keeping tabs on us today. The advent of cellular technology has made it so much easier to track where any of us have been, simply by triangulating the locations of the cell towers our phones have pinged along the way.

If you watch police procedurals on television (which I admit to doing more than is probably good for me), you’ll see a panoply of surveillance methods on display, in addition to cellular location data. 

It used to be only on British shows that the police could routinely rely on video recordings as aids in crime solving. For some decades, the Brits were ahead of us in creating a surveillance society. Nowadays, though, even the detectives on U.S. shows like Law and Order SVU (heading for its 27th season) can usually locate a private video camera with a sightline to the crime and get its owner to turn over the digital data.

Facial recognition is another technology you’ll see on police dramas these days. It’s usually illustrated by a five-second interval during which dozens of faces appear briefly on a computer monitor. The sequence ends with a final triumphant flourish—a single face remaining on screen, behind a single flashing word: “MATCH.”

How your data pulls in hundreds of billions of dollars for app and social media companies

The hidden cost of convenience

Many apps, including the weather channel app,
send you targeted advertising and sell your
personal data by default. Jack West, CC BY-ND

Kassem Fawaz, University of Wisconsin-Madison and Jack West, University of Wisconsin-Madison

You wake up in the morning and, first thing, you open your weather app. You close that pesky ad that opens first and check the forecast. You like your weather app, which shows hourly weather forecasts for your location. And the app is free!

But do you know why it’s free? Look at the app’s privacy settings. You help keep it free by allowing it to collect your information, including:

• What devices you use and their IP and Media Access Control addresses.
• Information you provide when signing up, such as your name, email address and home address.
• App settings, such as whether you choose Celsius or Fahrenheit.
• Your interactions with the app, including what content you view and what ads you click.
• Inferences based on your interactions with the app.
• Your location at a given time, including, depending on your settings, continuous tracking.
• What websites or apps that you interact with after you use the weather app.
• Information you give to ad vendors.
• Information gleaned by analytics vendors that analyze and optimize the app.

This type of data collection is standard fare. The app company can use this to customize ads and content. The more customized and personalized an ad is, the more money it generates for the app owner. The owner might also sell your data to other companies.

You might also check a social media account like Instagram. The subtle price that you pay is, again, your data. Many “free” mobile apps gather information about you as you interact with them.

As an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and a doctoral student in computer science, we follow the ways software collects information about people. Your data allows companies to learn about your habits and exploit them.

It’s no secret that social media and mobile applications collect information about you. Meta’s business model depends on it. The company, which operates Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, is worth US$1.48 trillion. Just under 98% of its profits come from advertising, which leverages user data from more than 7 billion monthly users.

What Trump’s budget says about his environmental values

That he doesn't have any?

Stan Meiburg, Wake Forest University and Janet McCabe, Indiana University

To understand the federal government’s true priorities, follow the money.

After months of saying his administration is committed to clean air and water for Americans, Donald Trump has proposed a detailed budget for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for fiscal year 2026. The proposal is more consistent with his administration’s numerous recent actions and announcements that reduce protection for public health and the environment.

To us, former EPA leaders – one a longtime career employee and the other a political appointee – the budget proposal reveals a lot about what Trump and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin want to accomplish.

According to the administration’s Budget in Brief document, total EPA funding for the fiscal year beginning October 2025 would drop from US$9.14 billion to $4.16 billion – a 54% decrease from the budget enacted by Congress for fiscal 2025 and less than half of EPA’s budget in any year of the first Trump administration.

Without taking inflation into account, this would be the smallest EPA budget since 1986. Adjusted for inflation, it would be the smallest budget since the Ford administration, even though Congress has for decades given EPA more responsibility to clean up and protect the nation’s air and water; handle hazardous chemicals and waste; protect drinking water; clean up environmental contamination; and evaluate the safety of a wide range of chemicals used in commerce and industry. These expansions reflected a bipartisan consensus that protecting public health and the environment is a national priority.

How Foreign Scammers Use U.S. Banks to Fleece Americans

They call it "pig-butchering" where YOU are the pig

By Cezary Podkul for ProPublica

Reporting Highlights

• Struggling Gatekeepers: In the face of some $44 billion a year in pig-butchering scams conducted by Asian crime syndicates, U.S. banks have failed to prevent mass scale money laundering.
• Black Market Bank Accounts: Chinese-language Telegram channels offer to rent U.S. bank accounts to pig-butchering scammers, who use the accounts to move victims’ cash into crypto.
• One Address, 176 Clients: Bank of America allowed hundreds of unverified customers to open accounts, prosecutors alleged, including 176 who claimed the same small home as their address.

These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.

Brian Maloney Jr. was flummoxed when he was served with a lawsuit against his family’s business, Middlesex Truck and Coach, in January. Maloney and his father, also named Brian, run the operation, located in Boston, which boasts that it can repair anything “from two axles to ten.” A burly man in his mid-50s who wears short-sleeved polo shirts emblazoned with the company name, Maloney Jr. has been around his dad’s shop since he was 8. The garage briefly surfaced in the media in 2012 when then-presidential candidate Mitt Romney made a campaign stop there and the Boston Herald featured Maloney Sr. talking about how he had built the business from nothing in a neighborhood he described as having been a “war zone.”

Now Middlesex was being sued by a New Jersey man who claimed he had been defrauded of $133,565 in a cryptocurrency scheme. The suit claimed Middlesex “controlled and maintained” a bank account at Chase that had been used to collect the fraudulent payment. The purported victim wanted his money back.

None of this made any sense to Maloney Jr. His company did not have an account at Chase, and he barely knew what crypto was. “For God’s sake, we fix trucks and still have AOL,” he would later say.

It was only after Maloney went to Chase to investigate that he was able to piece together at least part of the explanation. It turned out that Chase had allowed an unknown individual, who applied online with no identification, to open an account under Middlesex’s name, according to information Chase provided to Maloney. The account was then used to solicit hundreds of thousands of dollars from fraud victims, including the $133,565 from the man who was now trying to reclaim his funds.

Middlesex’s experience, as bizarre as it seems, is part of a global problem that plagues the banking industry. The account falsely opened in Middlesex’s name, and many others like it, are way stations in a sophisticated multistep money laundering process that transports cash from U.S. scam victims to crime syndicate bosses in Asia.

There’s been an explosion in international online fraud in recent years. Particularly widespread are “pig-butchering” schemes, as ProPublica reported in 2022. 

The macabre name derives from the process of methodically “fattening” victims by getting them to contribute more and more money to an investment scheme that seems to be succeeding, before eventually “butchering” them by taking all their deposits. Often operated by Chinese gangs out of prison-like compounds in Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar, pig-butchering in that region has reached a staggering $44 billion per year, according to a report by the United States Institute of Peace, and it likely involves millions of victims worldwide. The report called the Southeast Asian scam syndicates the “most powerful criminal network of the modern era.”

This breakthrough turns old tech into pure gold — No mercury, no cyanide, just light and salt

How to pull gold out of old computers and cell phones SAFELY

Flinders University 

Gold recovered from electronic waste in the Flinders University study.
Credit: Flinders University

An interdisciplinary team of experts in green chemistry, engineering and physics at Flinders University in Australia has developed a safer and more sustainable approach to extract and recover gold from ore and electronic waste.

Explained in the leading journal Nature Sustainability, the gold-extraction technique promises to reduce levels of toxic waste from mining and shows that high purity gold can be recovered from recycling valuable components in printed circuit boards in discarded computers.

The project team, led by Matthew Flinders Professor Justin Chalker, applied this integrated method for high-yield gold extraction from many sources - even recovering trace gold found in scientific waste streams.

The progress toward safer and more sustainable gold recovery was demonstrated for electronic waste, mixed-metal waste, and ore concentrates.

"The study featured many innovations including a new and recyclable leaching reagent derived from a compound used to disinfect water," says Professor of Chemistry Justin Chalker, who leads the Chalker Lab at Flinders University's College of Science and Engineering.

"The team also developed an entirely new way to make the polymer sorbent, or the material that binds the gold after extraction into water, using light to initiate the key reaction."

Extensive investigation into the mechanisms, scope and limitations of the methods are reported in the new study, and the team now plans to work with mining and e-waste recycling operations to trial the method on a larger scale.

"The aim is to provide effective gold recovery methods that support the many uses of gold, while lessening the impact on the environment and human health," says Professor Chalker.

The new process uses a low-cost and benign compound to extract the gold. This reagent (trichloroisocyanuric acid) is widely used in water sanitation and disinfection. When activated by salt water, the reagent can dissolve gold.

Next, the gold can be selectively bound to a novel sulfur-rich polymer developed by the Flinders team. The selectivity of the polymer allows gold recovery even in highly complex mixtures.

The gold can then be recovered by triggering the polymer to "un-make" itself and convert back to monomer. This allows the gold to be recovered and the polymer to be recycled and re-used.

Global demand for gold is driven by its high economic and monetary value but is also a vital element in electronics, medicine, aerospace technologies and other products and industries. However, mining the previous metal can involve the use of highly toxic substances such as cyanide and mercury for gold extraction - and other negative environmental impacts on water, air and land including CO₂ emissions and deforestation.

The aim of the Flinders-led project was to provide alternative methods that are safer than mercury or cyanide in gold extraction and recovery.

The team also collaborated with experts in the US and Peru to validate the method on ore, in an effort to support small-scale mines that otherwise rely on toxic mercury to amalgamate gold.

Gold mining typically uses highly toxic cyanide to extract gold from ore, with risks to the wildlife and the broader environment if it is not contained properly. Artisanal and small-scale gold mines still use mercury to amalgamate gold. Unfortunately, the use of mercury in gold mining is one of the largest sources of mercury pollution on Earth.

Professor Chalker says interdisciplinary research collaborations with industry and environmental groups will help to address highly complex problems that support the economy and the environment.

"We are especially grateful to our engineering, mining, and philanthropic partners for supporting translation of laboratory discoveries to larger scale demonstrations of the gold recovery techniques."

Lead authors of the major new study - Flinders University postdoctoral research associates Dr Max Mann, Dr Thomas Nicholls, Dr Harshal Patel and Dr Lynn Lisboa - extensively tested the new technique on piles of electronic waste, with the aim of finding more sustainable, circular economy solutions to make better use of ever-more-scarce resources in the world. Many components of electronic waste, such as CPU units and RAM cards, contain valuable metals such as gold and copper.

Dr Mann says: "This paper shows that interdisciplinary collaborations are needed to address the world's big problems managing the growing stockpiles of e-waste."

ARC DECRA Fellow Dr Nicholls, adds: "The newly developed gold sorbent is made using a sustainable approach in which UV light is used to make the sulfur-rich polymer. Then, recycling the polymer after the gold has been recovered further increases the green credentials of this method."

Dr Patel says: "We dived into a mound of e-waste and climbed out with a block of gold! I hope this research inspires impactful solutions to pressing global challenges."

"With the ever-growing technological and societal demand for gold, it is increasingly important to develop safe and versatile methods to purify gold from varying sources," Dr Lisboa concludes.

Fast Facts:

Electronic waste (e-waste) is one of the fastest growing solid waste streams in the world. In 2022, an estimated 62 million tons of e-waste was produced globally. Only 22.3% was documented as formally collected and recycled.

E-waste is considered hazardous waste as it contains toxic materials and can produce toxic chemicals when recycled inappropriately. Many of these toxic materials are known or suspected to cause harm to human health, and several are included in the 10 chemicals of public health concern, including dioxins, lead and mercury. Inferior recycling of e-waste is a threat to public health and safety.

Miners use mercury, which binds to gold particles in ores, to create what are known as amalgams. These are then heated to evaporate the mercury, leaving behind gold but releasing toxic vapors. Studies indicate that up to 33% of artisanal miners suffer from moderate metallic mercury vapor intoxication.

Between 10 million and 20 million miners in more than 70 countries work in artisanal and small-scale gold mining, including up to 5 million women and children. These operations, which are often unregulated and unsafe, generate 37% of global mercury pollution (838 tons a year) - more than any other sector.

Most informal sites lack the funding and training needed to transition towards mercury-free mining. Despite accounting for 20% of the global gold supply and generating approximately US$30 billion annually, artisanal miners typically sell gold at around 70% of its global market value. Additionally, with many gold mines located in rural and remote areas, miners seeking loans are often restricted to predatory interest rates from illegal sources, pushing demand for mercury.

Brown University engineers tackle brain injuries with innovative wearable technology

From kids playing sports to battle damage to soldiers, traumatic brain injury can ruin lives

By Juan Siliezar, Brown University

Traumatic brain injuries are a pervasive yet elusive health problem, affecting millions worldwide. According to recent data, an estimated 2 million people experience a traumatic brain injury each year in the U.S. 

From kids and adults on playing fields, to soldiers and sailors on battlefields, the risk of brain injury includes everything from mild concussion to chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) — a progressive disease often associated with football players who suffer repeated blows to the head.

Despite alarming trends about these types of injuries, they remain frustratingly difficult to diagnose and even harder to prevent. The applied mechanics laboratory at Brown University’s School of Engineering is part of an effort to develop solutions. The 10-person team — which includes postdoctoral researchers, graduate and undergraduate students — is led by Haneesh Kesari, an associate professor of engineering. The lab’s focus is centered on traumatic brain injury and blunt trauma the body can endure.

How Internet of Things devices affect your privacy – even when they’re not yours

You're not being paranoid to believe you're being watch and recorded because you are

David Sella-Villa, University of South Carolina

Some unusual witnesses helped convict Alex Murdaugh of the murders of his wife, Maggie, and son, Paul.

The first was Bubba, Maggie’s yellow Labrador retriever. Prosecutors used a recording of Bubba to place Alex at the site of the murders. Given Alex’s presence at the crime scene, other witnesses then revealed his movements, tracked his speed and explained what he had in his hands. Those other witnesses were a 2021 Chevy Suburban and Maggie, Paul and Alex’s cellphones, which all provided data. They’re all part of the Internet of Things, also known as IoT.

The privacy implications of devices connected to the internet are not often the most important consideration in solving a murder case. But outside of criminal prosecution, they affect people’s privacy in ways that should give everyone pause.

The Internet of Things

The Internet of Things includes any object or device that automatically sends and receives data via the internet. When you use your phone to message someone or social media to post something, the sharing is deliberate. But the automatic nature of connected devices effectively cuts humans out of the loop. The data from these devices can reveal a lot about the people who interact with them – and about other people around the devices.

As an assistant professor of law at the University of South Carolina, I have watched as new kinds of connected devices have entered the market. New devices mean new ways to collect data about people.

Connected devices collect information from different contexts. Take your refrigerator. As a non-IoT device, your fridge generated no data about your kitchen, your food or how often you peeked inside. Your relationship with the fridge was effectively private. Only you knew about that midnight snack or whether you ogled a co-worker’s lunch.

Now, smart refrigerators can respond to voice commands, show images of the items in your fridge, track who opens it, suggest recipes, generate grocery lists and even contact your car to let you know the milk has expired. All these functions require continuous streams of data.

Connecticut Senator Blumenthal wants probe into Trump cancellation of Veterans Administration contracts

Musk's DOGE kids used artificial intelligence to find and kill contracts deemed "Munchable"

By Eric Umansky and Vernal Coleman for ProPublica

Paul Windle for ProPublica

What Happened

Senators called for a federal investigation into the Trump administration’s killing of hundreds of contracts for the Department of Veterans Affairs. Democrat Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Angus King, a Maine independent, wrote to the agency’s inspector general asking for an investigation into the administration’s cancellation of the contracts and the consequences for veterans.

The senators highlighted “damning reporting from ProPublica” on the cancellations, including how the Department of Government Efficiency used an artificial intelligence tool that marked contracts as “MUNCHABLE.”

The senators wrote that DOGE’s use of AI to scrutinize contracts “adds an entire new level of unease connected to the decision-making, security, governance, and quality control of the entire process.”

VA officials have said they’ve killed nearly 600 contracts after DOGE’s review but have declined requests by lawmakers and ProPublica for details.

“Despite repeated requests in letters to the Secretary, questions at hearings, and dozens of emails to VA officials,” the senators wrote, “the Department has not provided a single briefing or a complete and accurate list of the contracts it has cancelled.”

Blumenthal and King wrote that the VA shared a list of contracts in May, but it was “riddled with errors and inaccuracies.”

Back to war with Canada and "thank you for your attention to this matter"

A normal day in Trumpworld

Why you should think twice before using shorthand like ‘thx’ and ‘k’ in your texts

Perspective on texting etiquette

David Fang, Stanford University

My brother’s text messages can read like fragments of an ancient code: “hru,” “wyd,” “plz” – truncated, cryptic and never quite satisfying to receive. I’ll often find myself second-guessing whether “gr8” means actual excitement or whether it’s a perfunctory nod.

This oddity has nagged at me for years, so I eventually embarked upon a series of studies with fellow researchers Sam Maglio and Yiran Zhang. I wanted to know whether these clipped missives might undermine genuine dialogue, exploring the unspoken signals behind digital shorthand.

As we gathered data, surveyed people and set up experiments, it became clear that those tiny shortcuts – sometimes hailed as a hallmark of efficient communication – undermine relationships instead of simplifying them.

General Assembly approves Victoria Gu to fight cryptocurrency ATM fraud

Hope it covers Trump’s crypto coin 

The General Assembly approved legislation sponsored by Senate Artificial Intelligence & Emerging Technologies Committee Chairwoman Victoria Gu and Rep. Julie A. Casimiro that aims to protect Rhode Islanders from a rapidly growing category of scams that use cryptocurrency ATMs to defraud victims.

“Cryptocurrency ATMs are kiosks that allow users to deposit cash and easily convert it into cryptocurrency. We’ve seen victims in our own communities lose thousands of dollars when scammers direct them to send cash through these machines. Rhode Island, compared to some neighboring states, is behind the curve on regulating this new technology,” said Chairwoman Gu (D-Dist. 38, Westerly, Charlestown, South Kingstown). 

“Crypto ATMs are unfortunately an increasingly common way for criminals to get away with their ill-gotten gains and without increased regulation, this trend will only accelerate.”